Megan Wacha - Research and Instruction Librarian for the Performing Arts at Barnard College of Columbia University

James Forrester - Visual Editor

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Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Wikipedia's legitimacy is underpinned by its citations, and yet long-standing problems with citations are yet to be fixed. Among some of the biggest issues are: the ease of inserting or modifying a citation, sharing citations between articles and between Wikipedias, and finding open access content to cite where possible.

Several Wikipedia citation reforms have been proposed in the past with mixed success. Starting in 2006 WikiScholar and Wikicite had the idea to create a sister project to hold citations for all Wikipedia language versions. While those have stalled for technical reasons, French Wikipedia long ago solved articles sharing citations.

New developments give us reason to believe that citation reform is more likely to succeed today. The introduction of Visual Editor could eliminate templating headaches. The maturing of Wikidata means Wikipedias can really share data. And the mainstream success of the Open Access Movement means more sources are free to read, and signal themselves as such. It is time to reassess how we handle citations at the Wikimedia level.

Our panel consists of domain experts from: the Publishing industry, Wikidata community, Library Science field, Open Access movement. Along with questions from the audience the panel covers the following topics:

When translating text from one language Wikipedia to another, why is it so difficult to translate the citations? Are cross-language citations desirable?

What is the role for Wikidata in managing references? Is Wikidata the right tool to hold citations.

In Wikicode, where is the balance between presenting citation templates readable by Wikipedia editors versus making a reusable citation for the readers?

What is the state of the Visual Editor's system for managing citations?

What do we want to know about our citation usage? What difficulties arise when publishers such as academic journals seek to track citations on Wikimedia projects?

Track

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)

60 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

yes

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